Horsley: 1 debate doesn't win election

Horsley

Normally I don’t watch presidential debates. I’d rather watch an old movie or walk the dog.

Last week’s debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was an exception. I was curious to see how the two men would look, side by side. We’ve seen plenty of each man separately, but before last week, not in the same room for quite a while.

If I were scoring the debate like a baseball game, I’d give it to Mitt, 6-3. He grabbed an early lead and never let go of it, sort of like the Texas Rangers did for most of this season. The president’s weak debate performance is bad news for Democrats, with a ray of hope at the end of the tunnel.

Romney had been prepping for this first of three debates for years, and it showed. He was peppy, had his talking points down, and seemed like he’d just had a blood transfusion. This, according to his supporters, is the Romney they’ve known all along, finally getting his game on.

The president, by contrast, seemed flat. The split-screen view of the men wasn’t kind to Obama, who scribbled notes as Romney talked and looked like he wasn’t fully present.

Romney had time to prep carefully for the first debate because he doesn’t have a day job. In fact, since he left the Massachusetts governor’s mansion in January 2007, he really hasn’t had a job at all except running for office.

Obama has a challenging day job. Immediately following the debate, Obama supporters began arguing he didn’t do so well because he’s so busy being president that he didn’t prep enough. If he had taken off work for several months (or years) to get ready for the debate, he might have done better.

Other Obama supporters argued that historically, incumbents don’t do well in first debates but usually go on to win elections. Still others said Obama really didn’t do badly in the debate — it just seemed like it.

You can spin the debate any way you like, but from where I sat, Obama got shellacked, big time. No reason to sugar-coat it.

To voters here in Texas, in one sense the debate really doesn’t matter. Owing to the redness of our red state, no matter what happened in last week’s debate or will happen in future ones, our state will award all 38 of its electoral college votes to team Romney. Win, lose or draw, Romney walks away with Texas.

Even if the entire Texas Panhandle decided to vote for Obama — a bit of a stretch, I know — it wouldn’t change the electoral college outcome. Texas has a winner-takes-all policy with our 38 electoral votes.

In another sense, the debate might not matter in the bigger picture either, because Obama probably will win the election for one simple reason: he’ll get more electoral votes. The magic number is 270, and Obama appears to have a lock on that number.

I say this because the most accurate indicator of how this election will go is a meta-analysis by Nate Silver of the New York Times. Silver has shown an uncanny accuracy in predicting election outcomes since he started analyzing demographic and voter patterns and blogging the results, first anonymously in 2007, then on a website launched in 2008 called The 538 (from the number of total electoral college votes).

In the 2008 presidential election, The 538’s statistical model correctly predicted the outcome in every state except Indiana and a sliver of Nebraska. It nailed every one of the 36 Senate races. In the 2010 midterm elections, The 538 got 34 out of 36 Senate seats correct and 36 of 37 governor’s races.

At the time of this writing, The 538 has Obama ahead, 321 electoral votes to 216. Though Silver advises caution with these numbers, a 100-point spread is a lot. Mitt’s the underdog with a remarkable tendency to say unbelievably dumb things and stick stubbornly to them before finally retracting them.

It’s still Obama’s election to lose.

David Horsley teaches English at West Texas A&M University and is a freelance writer. His email address is dhorsley@wtamu .edu.